


Lockbox - Red Carnations

by SomberCitizen



Series: Boxes [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 17:33:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13058811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomberCitizen/pseuds/SomberCitizen





	Lockbox - Red Carnations

I don’t feel good coming back home anymore. I don’t know if I can still call this place that. It doesn’t feel like one. It feels distant, like a half-forgotten memory of when I was just a baby. The ruins are covered in snow, shimmering iridescent under the white sun of the tundra, for the short time while it’s still out this season. It’s almost blinding, but I see where I’m going clearly. I’ve walked this path so many times before. 

 

I was afraid to come here before. To see the stones among the rubble. Afraid that I wouldn’t be alone here. Nothing else remains, the old city was left to rot and they build a pillar in the middle and hid in it. The tower is far away, I suppose they are also afraid. Maybe of the possibility of it all happening again, maybe they are scared of how much the cemetery has grown. So many new tombstones, many of them with some generic lines carved under the names and dates, telling nothing about the dead.

 

I kneel by the first grave and brush the frost away. He’s smiling in the picture, just like I remember him. His big smile and his witty eyes. My own start to sting, but I can’t let the tears fall. I almost laugh at the engraved line under his name. “He loved to laugh.” What kind of bullshit line is that? He was more than that. So much more. He was bright and beautiful and so smart. Sharp like the needles in my throat. I remember that night, while we were hiding in that freezing bunker, holding still, as quiet as we can be with dread in our hearts, the sound of giant machines stomping on the ground above us and his big smile. I asked him “How do you keep smiling?” and he said still smiling, eyes as bright as starlight, with that easy charm of his, “If I don’t, I would be screaming.” He loved to laugh..

 

I rest the flowers in the snow with a small flask of vodka and move to the next one. The needles push in deeper. The frost had fallen of the picture and I see him, just as he was when we first met. Before I was his and he was mine. Back when we were just those stupid kids that promised to marry each other if we survived. The tears want to go again, but I can’t let them. I’ve shed so many for him I could fill a river bed. So many that every time I feel like I’ve run dry and there couldn’t be anymore, but it’s never over. A wound that never heals and it stings and smarts when the tears fall and salt the raw flesh. Singes the nerves and cracks the bones, eats away the marrow. I can feel myself rot from the inside out and nothing can stop it, only delay the inevitable decay. It will come, sooner or later. That hollow chamber in me only grows with time.

 

Four flowers on his grave as well. I have none for the last one. I can’t even look at it. It’s completely bare, no snow or frost to cover the name and face and the picture is staring at me like a vulture. She knows of the decay and her eyes are boring into me. I can’t stand her. The engraving says “She loved her country.” Fuck you. No she doesn’t. All it ever did was take and leave her with nothing but bright red hands. Just like the carnations on the other graves. Like her mother’s lips and her father’s armor. Like the blood in the snow by the river.. She loved her country. Sure, long may the red mother live, stained with all the fucking blood she gave her. That’s all it is. A history of violence, seeped through every cell of her body. The violence she taught her and then laughed when she couldn’t live without.

  
  


There’s blood in the snow again. Three red drops blooming like the flowers, tainting the crystals. I can taste the copper in my mouth and I raise my hand to feel it soaking my scarf, as I pull it down. A nosebleed. Probably popped a blood vessel trying so hard not to let those tears fall. I can’t stay here anymore. I can’t look at the girl on the tombstone. I have to leave. Fuck this place. It’s not home anymore. Nothing is home anymore. “She loved her country” Fuck her country, it took home away from me. Home died by Yenisei. Home lives in those two empty graves under the carnations. 

 

I can’t stay here, I can’t fucking stand it. The wounds rot too fast here. There’s too much blood in the snow.

  
  



End file.
